The noble one moves, and those actions are mysterious to others, but simple to the noble one. How is that?

The noble one practices each day. What the noble one thinks and does is his or her own creation. No one else knows about it. If there have been defeats and discouragements, the noble one withdraws to find a solution within him or herself. If there have been successes and victories, the noble one is grateful and studies those triumphs in order to replicate them again.

What the noble one does in the course of daily life seems incomprehensible, magic, unique. But to the noble one, all was already envisioned. All was already practiced until the moment of action was mere performance.

Through many years of this, the force of personality of the noble one builds to tsunami magnitude. This is not easy. It is not quick. But once that stature appears, the noble one is hard to oppose. The noble one appears ordinary, perhaps even foolish. But when the moment to act comes, the event is resolved completely and overwhelmingly.

The noble on knows the power of the secret.

The Image of Hexagram 1 sets the tone:

Heaven moves with power: the noble one never stops strengthening himself.

In other words, in order to both emulate and express reverence to heaven, one has to make oneself stronger each day.

There are two downsides to that. First, it’s hard work. Secondly, each day carries with it a plethora of contradiction, problems, and perhaps worst of all, a succession of our own mistakes. Daily practice can be discouraging.

The upside is that the potential for one’s own improvement and even eventual enlightenment are squarely in one’s own hands. It’s far better to be in control of one’s destiny than to throw that to the lulling assumption that some other agent will do it for you.

Thus, the concept of the noble one is to be celebrated. Each of us is capable of improving ourselves and our lives, and then, by extension, the lives of those around us. Most kings in history ruled by virtue of being born to royalty. In the same way, we were each born to our lives, and we each occupy the throne of our lives. Therefore, each of us is the noble one, who must rule with grace and forethought, and who strives to be better at that each day.

This assumption is so significant that it is even embodied in the Taoist trinity known as the Three Purities. Of the three, only one, the Jade Emperor rules. Laozi on one side, and the Original Being on the other side (who voluntarily gave up his throne both to retire and to be a guiding eminence) are there to support and advise. In the I Ching, the Image, written by Confucius, is addressed to the noble one.

Today, any of us can use the I Ching. What was once the province of royalty is now the possession of all. Thus, each of us now takes the place of the noble one. We are each the noble one.

A Bagua fighter will rarely block an opponent directly. They would much rather feint, slip around, dodge, and then throw their opponent. By not challenging someone directly, they avoid injury. By being devious in their movements, they thwart their opponent’s strategy. By catching the straight punch or kick in a circular movement, they trap and upend. By generating centrifugal force, they can attack with overwhelming force.

All of that is in keeping with the principles of the I Ching. All is change. All extremes, like the opponent’s attacks, are neutralized by bringing them to their ultimate end—because that is when they must revert to their opposite character. So a punch allowed to stretch to full extension is weak, and the fighter vulnerable to counterattack.

That is what the Bagua fighter looks for. They don’t strive for a show of strength against strength. They let their opponent’s force explode until it must fade to yin—and then they exploit that weakness.

The I Ching and Bagua is about understanding, not brute force. It is about applying the principles of life, not striving to assert one’s blind will. In the same way—the unorthodox movement that arises from profound understanding—any person can become formidable using the ideas of the I Ching.

The Circular Martial art

Baguazhang doesn’t move like any other martial arts form in the world. It doesn’t look like Karate, Taikwondo, boxing or wrestling. Where other martial arts are performed by moving back and forth in a predominantly linear fashion, all the while practicing punches and kicks, Baguazhang is practiced by walking repeatedly in a circle.

But the walk is no ordinary walk. It’s more like striding and squatting at the same time—the lower the better. Good practitioners are able to walk around the circle with their thighs parallel to the ground. They are, in fact, exercising the stance that so preoccupies all martial arts—except that they’re doing it dynamically in their crouching position.

Bagua lays particular emphasis on twisting every part of the body. Where other martial arts engage in push-pull movements to strengthen the body, Bagua relies on twisting, and building muscles through the antagonistic turning of one muscle group against another.

Bagua and the I Ching

I suppose one could make up a fancy explanation on how this is derived from the I Ching. One could say that the low walking keeps on in contact witih the earth, that the upright spine and head keep one in contact with heaven. That one changes position as fast as fire and links one’s movements as flowing as water. We could say that the force of a strike is like thunder, and that the interpenetration of an opponents movements during a fight is like the wind rustling through a tree’s winter braches. We could say that the opponent’s strength must drain into us as the weak streams helplessly run into the lake, and that the opponent finds us as immovable as a mountain.

But no one thinks about this as they practice. They know that the philosophy is there: the philosophy is wordlessly internalized, and to the sages, that is best.

Every Chinese martial arts begins and ends with a salute to the audience. Each set consists of dozens of movements, and each movement is given a poetic name. Many styles have poems and songs that convey the major tenets of the form. Therefore, a martial arts style was no collection of methods to injury people, but a deep cultural form meant to embody athleticism, morality, good health, poetic expression, and spirituality.

On a practical level, martial arts was essential to the religious centers of China because they had to defend themselves from bandits, because the monks and nuns traveled to serve people and so were exposed to dangers from robbers and from wild animals, and because the temples sometimes held large amounts of land. Martial arts was also good exercise for the monks, and it helped build the strength needed for long periods of meditation. That combination of martial arts and meditation spread in both secular and sacred circles. Today, the internal martial arts in particular, including Baguazhang, incorporate meditation into their daily practice.

So before you recoil that martial arts is just some way to bully others, consider instead that the Chinese have used martial arts for thousands of years to bring discipline, health, safety and even enlightenment to its practitioners.

Happy Chinese New Year!

It’s the end of all bad things in the past year,
and the beginning of all good things for the new year.
May you enjoy good health, happiness, prosperity,
and the fulfillment of all your wishes.

Among the many cultural expressions of the I Ching is a martial arts known as Baguazhang.

Ba means eight. Gua means the trigrams of the I Ching. Zhang means palm. In Chinese martial arts, there are fist techniques and there are palm techniques (although most styles mix the two). A palm-based form is supposed to be more devastating, because it means that the practitioner projects internal energy into the opponent. It also allows for chopping and striking with the fingertips, and the extra few inches can make the difference in reach.

Before we get into a further discussion, though, some preliminaries are necessary.

How can a martial art be spiritual?

There have been many times when I’ve mentioned martial arts to people I meet and they are horrified. In fact, I’ve had people recoil and step back because they are so repulsed by the idea of fighting. So before I explain how there can be a martial art based on the I Ching, I first have to explain how Chinese culture prizes martial art not as a form of violence but as a deeply significant form of personal cultivation.

Martial arts goes back to the very beginnings of Chinese culture, and from very early times, a person of cultivation was expected to know both martial and scholarly arts. People as well-known as Confucius, Laozi (a key figure in Daoism), Li Bai (the Tang dynasty poet many consider China’s greatest poet), the later poet Su Dongpo and many emperors were all martial artists.

The recent announcement of the iPad certainly looks as if it will change the way we read. I don’t know if that will happen or not, and I’m certainly interested to see if it does. But I bring this up now because the I Ching has already gone through many different forms. From inscriptions on bone, to writings on slips of bamboo, to scrolls, and to bound books,  the I Ching has already gone through the “death” of several technologies and it still survives. So I think it will easily go into the digital world, and this very site is part of that evolution.

Let me mention one critical way in which a book (in whatever form it takes) is invaluable: it transcends time and space. Through a book, you can communicate with people long dead. If you’re an author, you can communicate with people after your own death. You can communicate over vast distances. The internet makes that obvious, but even in the past, when a book was smuggled to someone, or mailed overseas, it had this marvelous ability to open up entire worlds of ideas to people. Nearly every religion was spread in part through books.

So let’s not be so quick to dismiss the book. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s going to morph into other forms. The iPad book store still uses the metaphor of the book and bookstore, and so it’s really the book taking on a “virtual” form. As such, then, the book is not dead and books like the I Ching will continue to speak across what would otherwise be barriers.

Are we fixed? Are we supposed to stay exactly as we are? No, we are supposed to change and in fact we all do each day. Sometimes it’s aging. Sometimes it’s the scar of a tragic circumstance. Sometimes it’s learning. But we change every day.

Just as the Daoist way is to manage outside change, it is the Daoist way to manage inside change. It’s the Daoist way to embrace change.

Today, I heard from someone who hasn’t had contact with me for about twenty years. He wrote to me, but he remembered me as I was twenty years ago. I’m not that way any more.

We all have to change. We all need to change. And we should not be held back by anyone’s memories or expectations of us. In Hexagram 42, Increase, the Image says: “The noble one sees perfection and shifts to fit its pattern, and corrects his own faults.”